I found a smattering of random notes in my writing desk. There are pages and pages of observations. I’m putting them here because I think maybe there is a theme but I may only find it by sharing. I also don’t want to lose track of these fragments. As an intrepid bricoleur, the ephemera is everything to me.

The first two, scrawled on index cards from my thesis research:

The Masculine objectifies everything.

Why lure her into a pasture instead of joining her in the open prairie? What are you afraid of?

Notes from a day and conversation with a guy I dated.

Homemade bone broth. The gift of a backpack. Lightning.

Cage(s)

Cage-free.

Lure – allure.

The Paleo Relationship

Free range love.

A conversation heard between two thirtysomething white males over breakfast one Sunday morning at a local diner:

Pac-12 (I don’t know what this is. Sportsball I think.)

Bank accounts. They discussed having secret accounts so their wives wouldn’t know all of their funds. They didn’t like having shared resources. One said, “When you’re married, you do have to answer questions. That’s what sucks.”

(They didn’t want their strip club escapades to be discovered.)

Frat boys talking about weight loss. Different guys at the same booth. (Men often eat really quickly.)

Random notes written during this breakfast. Somehow related.

Everyone is moving away from their moms. From where they came from.

Powerful young woman vs. Shrill older woman.

And another note that seems completely non-sequitur is from the wayback machine. When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do for my research in grad school. It says:

Life is complicated, isn’t it? Recently, I was working at the front desk at work, a co-working space in Seattle. An elderly lady was sitting in stillness for almost two hours in the sunlight, her veined hands endlessly turning a brochure over and over. A half hour before closing, I decided to check on her. Turns out she has dementia. She didn’t know who had dropped her off or who was picking her up. She just knew she was waiting for someone. I tried to figure out how I could help her. I didn’t want to kick her out but couldn’t just leave her there.

Eventually, we figured out that someone in a meeting upstairs had left her in the lobby. Just left her there. Didn’t say anything to us. Didn’t leave a note with her just in case. The woman didn’t even have ID save a bus pass with her name on it.

I imagine it’s hard to care for a parent with dementia. I know that this kind of thing often ends up in the hands of middle-aged women who are trying to make a living and have a career. Sometimes they are women with children they are still raising.

And yet here I was, working through what to DO because that’s also part of life. Borders need to be tended. Not without compassion but they do. I was comforted to know that this woman wasn’t one of the homeless women that walk through our doors seeking a place to sit and be. I was comforted to know that she had a bed to sleep in.

The situation still makes my heart ache though. What if the woman would have wandered outside? What if she was one of the many people in our city/world who don’t have a home, who don’t have a safety net underneath them? We say we need to open our borders to everyone but I work in a place that cannot house homeless people no matter how much we want to. No matter how kind we are, this isn’t possible. The world is messy and complicated. We need to honor that complexity. We need to speak out and we also need to listen. We need to care and to value care and we need to have some sort of system in place to manage care. If we see everything as either/or and engage in polemics, we are lost.

Let’s find our way.

Let’s find each other.

Let’s love each other.

Audre Lorde said, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

But how do we do that? How do we celebrate differences? At the Pride parade this year here in Seattle and made way through downtown on my bike. Stopping to watch the parade, I was so full of love for all the people I saw represented. All across the spectrums of age, gender and ethnicity, people were smiling and cheering. I talked to a police officer who was standing at a corner. I said, “Wow. You must be so warm in that uniform!” She said, “You have no idea.”

I thanked her for being there. I’ve marched in Pride twice with my child, the first time right after the Pulse shooting had happened. The police made me feel so safe all lined up to contain the fabulous. They were part of the love fest that is Pride just as much as anyone else. They tend the borders that contain the beauty and joy.

Love, like life, is filled with ambiguity, isn’t it? Holding various perspectives takes so much practice and an ocean of compassion. It requires a practice of inquiry and a release of assumptions. It requires patience but also a kind of gentle ferocity. We have to find our yeses and both our hard and soft noes. We have to both find our voice and our listening ears. We also have to take action. It’s easy to get paralyzed when things seem so out of control so we take the actions we can.

I gave blood recently. They told me that my one pint of blood could save 3 lives. I find that astonishing. I can save lives I will never know. I don’t know who will receive my blood and I don’t care. Their ideology is less important to me than their humanity. None of us can save every life and working through border issues, whether inside our hearts or on land is one of the humanitarian issues of our times.

There’s so much I want to say. So much I could say about friendship, and belonging, and how care (or the absence of it) feels deep in the center of my being. About feeling dehumanized so often. Objectified. Plunked into the fantasies and projections of men who said they loved me but didn’t show me care.

I could talk about how my ache for belonging has led me to saying yes when I knew it should be a “no”. About how finding the courage to finally say “no” meant being cast out. Shut out. (Or worse.)

About how that makes me not trust anyone, especially myself.

I will write about those things and more. I know there are others who need to these stories but today, just for today, I’ll linger on the sweet sustenance of this poem by Hafiz and just let my heart rest deep inside my animal body.

“All the Hemispheres
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadow and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new watermark on your excitement
And love.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.”

~Hafiz

Update: After I wrote this, I went to yoga with one of my favorite teachers, Ashley. At the end of class, she put my head in her hands and gently said, “I’ve got you girl.” Quiet tears rolled down my cheeks.

Today’s randomly-chosen word is be and comes from The Quantum and the Lotus by Matthieu Ricard & Trinh Xuan Thuan. It’s a fascinating exploration of the intersection of Western science and Buddhist philosophy. I cannot more highly recommend this book. Turns out, I’m in good company:

The Quantum and the Lotus is the rich and inspiring result of a deeply interesting dialogue between Western science and Buddhist philosophy. This remarkable book will contribute greatly to a better understanding of the true nature of our world and the way we live our lives. —His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Conversations on the nature of life and what it means to be–to exist–are keenly interesting to me. I personally often find that the world around me shifts somewhat dramatically depending on what I’m focusing on which enhances studies of this type. The Bricolage Project, with its ephemeral nature, has led me to a greater awareness of my state of being on any given day. Not surprisingly, when I was out with my friend the other night, he began telling me about his meditation practice, Vipassana. The word means to “see things as they really are” and the practice is one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation. My friend recounted his time of going on a ten-day silent meditation retreat at a local meditation center and told me I would “rock Vipassana” because I have a way of seeing and experiencing things as they are that seems to align with the practice. As he described spending several days focusing on his nose and upper lip, I found myself thinking of my upper lip and how I love it kissed or sucked on. Then I looked at my friend’s lip and noticed that he has a kind of beard/soul patch thing but not a mustache. Then I would switch back to just being aware of the surface area of the lip and noticing my awareness there rather than a vision of it in mind.

Then I took a sip of my Manhattan.

Here’s the thing: I am a very embodied creature. I like sex. I am lusty. I love the smell of dirt. I’ve had two babies. I am a creature of the earth. Yes, I am certainly the awareness that is poured into this form but they are one, not separate. I find many spiritual traditions problematic in their rejection of the immanent aspect of life in favor of the transcendent. To be is to live the embodied life, to feel, to play, to express, not just to notice. I learned that as a new mother trying to learn how to meditate and walk a spiritual path as a householder. I was a nursing mother who had to tend to my baby’s needs. Such is the way of living the embodied life. Even now, taking ten days off to go on a retreat is not something I can do as a single mother. My child needs me to be here caring for her. Motherhood taught me a lot about surrender. To be is to surrender to the flow of the river of life. It’s uncontainable and will pull you under and have its way with you. As Laozi says:

Listening is an essential aspect of the feminine. It refers to a dynamic receptivity to the life going on around us, an awareness of our own interconnectedness, and our responsibility to be open to what comes to us.

Feeling into, being with, listening in to the whispers of the world and not trying to make sense of it as much as just allowing it to unfold and flow–that’s what that kind of listening means to me. Ms. Hart bluntly told me, “It isn’t your job to save the world. It’s your job to be the power you are in the world.”

I think I’m finally getting a sense of what that means, of what it means to be. Thanks for joining me on this wild ride.

Note: The poem I’m reading on the video up there is Darest Thou Now O Soul from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. It’s the poem from the joy! post the other day. I wasn’t done with it.

I went biking around Greenlake with my daughter this afternoon so I decided to make my bricolage there with whatever I found. The graffiti was already on the table and I love it. Love the color and the form. My rule was that everything had to come from the ground. You will see that the date is made up from the objects in the piece. I loved doing this. It took a long time to get it just right and I found it very meditative. As we biked home at twilight after biking for about ten miles, I felt so renewed.

Today’s word(s) “waking-life”, comes from Michael Meade‘s book Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul. This book is so good. So devourable. If you’ve never seen Meade speak or been to one of his workshops, I highly recommend it. You will come away altered. I count him as one of my most beloved and revered teachers. Today’s quote comes from the book I mentioned:

photographic evidence of me doing the word choosing

When we ignore the limits of fate and thehints of destiny we tighten the unconscious web of our lives. Eventually, we make our lives fixed, settled, and intractable. Thus, we seal our own fate and ignore our hidden destinies…Shifting fate and finding the destiny within is part of the art of truly living and of living truly.

I heard it’s National Poetry Day today so I’ll share one of my very favorite poems:

I Ask for Silence, Pablo Neruda (trans. Alastair Reid)

Now they can leave me in peace.
Now they grow used to my absence.

I am going to close my eyes.

I want only five things,
five chosen roots.

One is an endless love.

Two is to see the autumn.
I cannot exist without leaves
flying and falling to the earth.

The third is the solemn winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of fire in the rough cold.

Fourth, the summer,
plump as a watermelon.

And fifthly, your eyes,
Matilde, my dear love,
I won’t sleep without your eyes,
I won’t exist without your gaze,
I adjust the spring
for you to follow me with your eyes.

That, friends, is all I want.
Next to nothing, close to everything.

Now they can go if they wish.

I have lived so much that some day
they will have to forget me forcibly,
rubbing me off the blackboard.
My heart was inexhaustible.

But because I ask for silence,
don’t think I’m going to die.
The opposite is true;
it happens I am going to live.

To be, and to go on being.

I will not be, however, if inside me,
the crop does not keep sprouting,
the shoots first, breaking through the earth
to reach the light;
but the mothering earth is dark,
and, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
the night leaves behind stars
and goes on alone across fields.

It’s a question of having lived so much
that I want to live a bit more.